2016 — 14 March: Monday
Although it has been satirically suggested to me that, as usual, I'm trying to push too many pixels around using bleeding edge chips (a charge I refute) I have to admit that it seems to be rare these days for a fresh installation of Linux on a new PC to get things absolutely right out (as it were) of the starting gate. My expressed confidence regarding yesterday's "Proof of Concept" is already now, erm, yesterday's news, relating (as it did) to a no-longer extant system1 here in Technology Towers. Although my spiffy new Asus motherboard has HDMI 2 the 34" Dell cannot benefit from that, and I already know support for DisplayPort from the Intel is a no-go area for the Dell.
I'm not completely mad!
My initial hope, of course, was that the on-chip graphics and audio support from the Skylake CPU would by now be good enough to make my fitting and use of any subsidiary expansion cards unnecessary. Thus reducing heat and noise. However, the new Fractal Design case has turned out to be jolly good at cutting down the decibels and expelling the (not very) hot air remarkably quietly. So avoidance of expansion cards is no longer top of my (non-existent) worry list. Skylark is, in fact, quieter than BlackBeast Mk III which pleases me. I guess the bog-standard Novatech gaming cases I've used until now really are a bit too cheap and cheerful.
I've also sent...
... a polite but firm email to the Novatech elf demanding that he magic up the missing screw and stand-off spacer for the dinky little M.2 SSD. The next email will be a lot less polite if needed.
Breakfast ingested, I'm contemplating the morning sunshine with mild pleasure and gently pondering the phased migration of my Computing Life over to the newest toy. I also have to give some degree of thought to the logical division of my online web presence into "stuff that's public" and "stuff that isn't" in light of the upcoming radical change to my web-hosting modus vivendi when Junior gets his own act together and supplies me with the AWS S3 credentials that will enable me to shovel a carefully-curated pure-HTML subset of 'molehole' out into a big wide world.
This was his parting shot to me:
I will set up an AWS account and furnish you with credentials.
Options for managing files:
o s3ql - https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/overview
o s3fs-fuse - https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse (or dragondisk.com ?)
AWS command line tools:
o install: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/installing.html#install-with-pip
o sudo pip install awscli
o docs for s3 sync - http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3/sync.html
need to ensure that what you upload is only what you want to make public.
2013 article on password cracking - http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/how-i-became-a-password-cracker/
keepass for linux
Doesn't waste words, my son, does he? Still, I have two weeks before they next darken my doorstep, full this time (I hope) of garden-clearing energy.
My Raspberry Pi2...
... also had a bit of a meltdown yesterday. Cutting its ration of juice for ten seconds encouraged it to struggle on. Both it and my main desktop PC run full-fat versions of 'molehole' under lighttppd but I've kept the external version much slimmer. The revised method of synchronising folders for uploading will need just a bit of careful thought. And a round tuit.
My return journey...
... from Soton took me on an unplanned detour through quite a lot of Shirley as I missed the "correct" right-hand turn near the Copper Shop and thus initially ended up on the fringes (shudder) of Millbrook before I got any chance to rectify my route. (I blame the navigator, of course.) Still, I note I've got 102 miles and am still on the first "blob" on the petrol gauge. Motorway cruising of last Saturday's sort is clearly beneficial from time to time. [Pause] Time for a "blob" of lunch before taking Skylark out for another test flight.
Bang to rights?
Just when you think...
... nothing about Linux and display screens could ever surprise you again, you learn that downgrading the 34" Dell's DisplayPort input from 1.2 to 1.1 cures its inability to display 3440x1440 at 60Hz via DP from the Skylake NUC and the Skylake, erm, Skylark. How weird is that? Of course, in the meantime I bypassed the whole sorry issue by nipping out for that mystery tour of Shirley during which I bought, and have now fitted, an nVIDIA GTX 950 that can only be bothered to spin its two cooling fans if it gets sufficiently hot and, erm, bothered. And delivers rock-solid, perfect 3440x1440 at 60Hz via HDMI.
My childish ambition to have both the NUC and Skylark feeding the Dell, and using just the one keyboard and mouse, edges slightly nearer...
I had to poke Novatech a bit more firmly in my second email of today, but a screw and standoff should now be in the post to me. That will do, I hope.